8th February 2026

This coffee table book covers the three films of the Kelvin Timeline - but mostly it covers the first one, and then less of the latter two.

There's a few pages on each element, from uniforms, to aliens, to sets, and ships. Each section has a small amount of text, with some commentary or insight from the design team. And then lots of images, schematics, paintings, and occasionally photots or screencaptures of the finished product.

While there are a lot of pictures, some of them felt very small, and I found it hard to really take in what the text wanted me to. The image captions weren't always as clear as I would have liked which imag or images they mapped to, and there didn't feel like as much of a narrative between them as perhaps I would have liked.

Some of the drawings had been replicated in a faint blue colour on white pages, which felt an odd choice and made them hard to see in detail - it felt like a better contrast would have helped.

Overall I was left feeling underwhelmed and that it didn't do the job as well as equivalent books from the 1990s.

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8th February 2026

The seventh book is another exciting entry in the series, and moves around the characters with a good frequency - we get long enough to feel like it's not flitting, but not so long we get bored of any particular plotline before shuffling to the next.

And there's a lot happening, we spend time with all the main characters and they are all on their own journeys in this one, in differing parts of the world, and dealing with different problems.

I really enjoyed it, and was almost tempted to go on to book eight straight away. There's things happening now that I don't properly remember from before, which is interesting. The climax of this one though did feel like it came out of nowhere, so I'm not sure if my lack of memory meant I missed some of the hints that it was coming.

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1st February 2026

The third Paperback Sleuth adventures sees Cordellia hired to find the rumoured elusive final book in a series of WW2 thrillers, and once again this leads to people really wanting to kill her.

It's fun and silly and gripping. There's so many characters that we meet who are larger than life, and yet totally fit into this world.

I read the entire book in the course of a 3-hour flight, which felt a bit of a waste of such a good book, but also did the necessary job of keeping me entertained and distracted from the real world.

My only worry is that there are no more announced stories in this world, and I've really loved reading them so far.

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1st February 2026

I don't remember how this book ended up on my wish list. I don't remember where I bought it from. I felt nervous going in. But I really loved it.

Two adult siblings attempt to Christmas with the rest of their chaotic family, but find a time machine in the middle of the night and transport themselves back to 1984 and really mess up the timeline.

It's a great idea. The writing feels a bit rougher than normal books that I read - it has a very informal tone, and has the feel of not having been through quite the same amount of editing. And yet somehow for once this doesn't actually detract at all.

I read most of the book on a 3-hour flight, and it felt exactly the right sort of tone and pace for this. Really fun, engaging, and distracting.

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1st February 2026

The second of Natasha Pulley's books that I've read and wildly different from the first in terms of setting, and yet really similar in tone.

This is the story of Thaniel, a civil servant and telegraphist in 19th Century London, as he's caught up in significant events for the Japanese and Irish communities.

It's a complex blend of historical fiction and fantasy, with exotic clockwork, timey-wimeyness, and a range of really interesting characters with rich and varied backgrounds.

I found it incredibly readable and am both delighted and slightly wary of having discovered that there are sequels.

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17th January 2026

I was a bit dubious going in after not enjoying Hindle's previous murder mystery as much as I had hoped, but luckily I was wrong and this one's great fun.

It's New Year's Eve, and a murder mystery party has been organised to try to drum up some business from the dilapidated local hotel - but everyone's got a challenging life at the moment and are looking for ways to solve it... which may or may not include killing off one of the players.

It's a really clever little classic mystery, with a solid cast of characters with proper backgrounds, connections, and unresolved histories. I liked the various point of view characters, and that we got to spend time in several heads, not just one. The more contemporary setting was nice but didn't detract from a story that feels pretty timeless.

I did manage to spot the conclusion coming, but I don't think that's a negative at all - the perfect mystery is the one the reader solves just before the characters.

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17th January 2026

This prequel to the first book in the series gives some extra background to how the situation at the start came about. This confusingly makes it chronologically the middle book of the series, but as far as I can tell they can be read in any order and still work.

However my memory of the first book, after just two years, is too hazy to really understand all the context and how it fits in - whether there are overlapping characters or settings, or whether it's just serving to set the scene for the world.

As a standalone, I think it struggles a bit. Part of the beauty of the main books of the series is the depth and the detail and the amount of slow steady worldbuilding that can happen, and deep relationships that the reader can develop with the characters over the course of a thousand pages. This skips all that and feels shallow by comparison.

This book is split into two halves called Before and After. Which makes sense from the perspective of most of the plot. But one thread only appears in the Before half and isn't followed up on in the After, which felt very weird and like a forgotten or pointless bit of plot. Perhaps had I better memory of the original novel it would fit more comfortably, but as I read it came across as a mistake.

Ultimately I suppose I'm mostly disapointed that this wasn't a big main book in the series, and didn't deliver the level of enjoyment I was hoping for.

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